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More, the quality of the writing is as fluent as it is uniquely different.

So much so that in my initial review I observed: ‘Idiosyncratic, off-the-wall, quirky, often bizarre, sometimes surreal…..Hudson offers his weird and wonderful insight into the world of flowing football and life in the London fast lane.’

Since then, after being hit by a car while walking along the street in 1997, which resulted in a prolonged coma, multiple operations and left him hobbling painfully through life, he has eked out a sparse living by using his writing talent as a blogger.’

Since the book's release, he has eked out a sparse living by using his writing talent as a blogger

That has added a maturity to his work which illuminates the updated version with heightened judgement and deeper poignancy, as well as shedding more shocking light on his mowing down on a London pavement which was investigated as a possible hit.

Hudson made enemies - as a working-class lad unwilling to compromise his belief in the beautiful game, not least among England managers of a more pragmatic leaning.

And he also made them in this book which lifted the curtain on the football drinking culture – not least along the King’s Road in the Slurping Seventies - and his subsequent criticism of what he perceives as Chelsea’s failure to help the club’s former heroes when they fall on hard times.

‘When I first published many readers were not ready for the book’s honesty, eccentricity and acknowledgement of the role of alcohol in the game and my life,’ says Hudson. ‘I broke the mould of formulaic, ghost-written football autobiographies.’

‘When I first published many readers were not ready for the book’s honesty,' Hudson says

Then he adds with a wry chuckle: ‘Like its subject, it was ahead of its time.’

The humour has survived not only his close encounter with death on the street but also the privations of living in hostels not far from the humble prefab in Chelsea where the lad called Huddy was born and bred.

Michael Parkinson said of his writings: ‘Apart from being abducted by aliens there is nothing dramatic that hasn’t happened to Alan Hudson. But give it time.’

That we still do. Somehow, at 66, he is still challenging us with his forthright opinions.

Meanwhile, despite his own much straightened circumstances, Hudson is donating £1 from each sale of his reprinted book to the care fund in aid of his fellow football rebel, Stan Bowles, who is in the final stages of dementia.

The Working Man’s Ballet, republished by London Books, November 20, paperback, £12.99